aflatmirror

I just randomly found it on my bookshelf today. I don't remember when or how I got it, but certainly I received it while she was still alive. Never read it until today, going gray at the temples in my childhood bedroom.

I can't read or listen to her work except in the shadow of her death--at 35, to cancer, in her own daughter's infancy. Her husband, now almost 8 years her widower's, albums chronicling his grief for her, acclaimed for their dogged honesty. His refusal to take it as a metaphor, a lesson, anything but the woman he lived his life with suddenly ceasing to exist.

Her memoir of her childhood takes us to the halfway point of her life. But like any artist who died young, like the last person I wrote any kind of review about, she didn't live toward her death. She wrote and drew and sang because she had stories she wanted to tell.

The other "critical receptions" I've read of the book are...I don't know how to put it...alien to me. They talk about its power and honesty, the loss of innocence and disorientation of trauma. I didn't know her, but I feel certain she couldn't have possibly thought of it in those terms. When you're from that disjointed mosaic of pain and mundanity and beauty, you aren't shocked like that. It's the water you swam in, and crawled out of like John Darnielle's tetrapod. You write it all down because it's the inevitable end product of a reaction catalyzed in a child's open eye. You share it because unless you do, there's no chance of ever understanding and being understood by a creature from dry land. I read it and I see someone whose girlhood took a recognizable shape. I see a sister. If A Crow Looked at Me makes me feel like I know the empty Geneviève-shaped space in her husband's heart, Susceptible makes me feel a bit like I know her.